Change of specialization: from web development (PHP, Drupal) to artificial intelligence (AI), advise strategy and firms

Question

coworking

Hi Habr!

When I studied at the university, my favorite subject was the course "Intelligent Information Systems". Neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic - all these are not empty words for me, but hours of modeling in Matlab and handed in term papers. Later, already somewhere idle interest, and somewhere purposeful curiosity, expanded my knowledge to fuzzy time series and Bayesian networks. I am currently participating in Stanford University's ai-class.org course and I love it.



However, life, as usual, has made its own adjustments, and instead of AI, I earn my bread with web development, which now also remains my favorite subject, but I really want something more serious, interesting and, to be honest, more profitable, due to than I formulate the following question to the respected habraaudience.

Please advise firms in Moscow, St. Petersburg or Europe and the USA where you can get a job as a programmer (developer, developer) of intelligent systems. As an example, I see Google with its cybercars, Google Translate, the field of computer games (bot development), character recognition (FineReader and ABBY), financial institutions - mechanical trading systems - MTS, text analysis (search, autoabstracting, highlighting topics, NLP, computational linguistics). I agree to start from the position of an intern (especially if the company is in Europe :)).

My current level:
PHP, Python - industrial level, C - more or less, rarely used (at the level, write your own simple extension for PHP). Well, every little thing like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, VBA.

It is my understanding that the above areas of AI applications require C++ as an industry standard. I am not good with this language, i.e. in general, it just didn't work out. Or at least Java is required (now I'm learning it using the example of Android applications).

Where to begin? Is it worth it to learn Enterprise languages ​​like C++ and Java first, or straight out of the woods? :)

And another important question. How do you write a resume in this case? Those. It seems that I don’t have a single AI-related project in my portfolio - it’s all one web development. How to properly position yourself, what position to apply for?

Answer 1

what to indicate:
- completed courses and titles of term papers
- modeling experience in MatLab - of
course, articles in near-AI magazines with a big Impact Factor, if any AI, I can’t live without it , which one I can claim: - and what you pull, then claim it :) ... anyway, everything will be decided by an interview with a team leader or someone there will conduct an interview with them

Answer 2

if the search for such work is delayed, try to participate in the OpenSource project. quite often commercial enterprises are based on them. maybe they will notice you there.

Answer 3

Hey!
AI is actively used in the development of business intelligence systems, for example. You can google it, I'm sure that there should be companies in Moscow and St. Petersburg that deal with such projects.
It is also actively used in network security systems. You have at least Kaspersky Lab and its "daughter" - InfoWatch.
This is what comes to mind off the top of my head :-) I'm sure that after a certain amount of research, it will be possible to find a lot of opportunities to work on AI. Keywords: business intelligence, data mining, big data.
Good luck!

Answer 4

Did you find a job? And then come to me.